Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @10:11PM
from the get-poor-quick-scheme dept.

innocent_white_lamb writes "A man has been fined ONE BEELYUN DOLLARS (yes, really) for sending 4,366,386 spam messages that were posted on Facebook. He was fined $100 for each message, and including punitive damages he now owes $1,068,928,721.46. A ruling by a US District Court judge in San Jose, California has now been upheld by the Quebec Superior Court (the defendant lives in Montreal)."

I just have to think -- when was the last time a large corporation was fined $1 billion for anything? This has to be just because he had a crappy lawyer or something. Justice quality depends on personal resources in America, no doubt about it.

I just have to think -- when was the last time a large corporation was fined $1 billion for anything? This has to be just because he had a crappy lawyer or something. Justice quality depends on personal resources in America, no doubt about it.

The real question is when have they paid it... There have been fines. (Reduced on appeal)

In this case, the spammer went with the, no lawyer defence and didn't even bother to turn up. Big catch with that is "Guerbuez fooled its users into providing him with their user names and passwords" and that is interfering with a computer network a criminal offence. The evidence for which has now been established in a civil court and the spammer has show complete contempt for that court not only be freely admitting his guilt but also by mocking the fine by saying he will declare bankrupt and keep all the criminal proceeds from that crime.

This then forces US law to intervene and seek criminal prosecution for interfering with a computer network, via obtaining user name and passwords under false pretences and using that to fraudulently misrepresent the products he was advertising as being recommended by friends of the victims and also interfering with those 'friends' computer network.

You have the right to remain silent, remember those words when you want to get rich quick by breaking the law and don't make a ass out of yourself by publicly bragging about and defending your criminal activities.

Yeah, 'cause that $1B total fine to a bald, goateed, tatooed, BROKE spammer in Canada is really going to send that extra message: "all you bald, goateed, tatooed, broke spammers in Canada, don't spam or we will fine you almost a tenth of a percent of your country's GDP, payable immediately!"

Please tell me how his physical appearance has anything to do with what he's being assessed as a fine.

And you might amend that description to "bald, goateed, tattooed, BROKE, unrepentant and defiant." Seems to me that if you brag about your crime, threaten BK so that nobody can 'come after you' etc. etc. that perhaps the judge setting the award might take that into consideration when pronouncing sentence, dontcha think?

RTFA: "According to Facebook, Guerbuez fooled its users into providing him with their usernames and passwords. One method was the use of fake websites that posed as legitimate destinations."

"After Guerbuez gained access to user's personal profiles, he used computer programs to send out millions of messages promoting a variety of products, including marijuana and penis-enlargement products, Facebook said."

How much damage is that to you?

Whatever the damages are, to me the punitive fines of USD100 per user seem fair to me. So he should still be looking at USD400+ million in fines.

I don't think you want to encourage "economies of scale" when it comes to crimes.

So if you figure out a clever but illegal way to paste ads on 4 million people's front-doors, you should only be fined the same amount as someone who does it on one door?

Yes those people "could always remove the crap on their front door", but if you keep letting people get away with it, you end up with crap permanently on your door.

You do city-scale damage, you get city-scale fines. Sounds fair to me. Don't like it, think before you do it.

It's like those littering fines. Yes it doesn't cost that much to remove one coke can from the ground, or a discarded wrapper.

I don't see why someone should get a smaller fine per offense than a "normal person" just because they chose to make money in a way which involves littering on a massive scale.

Apart from stealing a load of bandwidth and wasting about a couple of years of productivity (deleting four million spams adds up), he set up a load of fake websites to steal Facebook user's passwords (which is how he sent the spam).

Is that your definition of 'harmless fun'? Seems other people don't agree with you...

I just have to think -- when was the last time a large corporation was fined $1 billion for anything? This has to be just because he had a crappy lawyer or something.

If my lawyer had come and said "Great news, I got your fine reduced from $1 billion to $10 million" I'd say "Great, that's like reduing my 20000 year sentence to a 200 year sentence." Corporations try their best to avoid a billion dollar fine because they might just have the money to pay it. If my lawyer wasted his time doing the same, he would be a crappy lawyer.

Eli Lilly agreed in 2009 to pay $515M, regarded as the "largest criminal fine paid by a single corporation in federal prosecution". Along with that went a $100M forfeiture of assets and a $800M civil settlement with the US and several state governments, for a grand total of $1.415 billion.

I wonder how much the fine would have been if each spam message contained a song "owned" by one of the MAFIAA. You could generate a fine larger than the entire money supply of the whole world put together. This feels almost like a challenge now.

I wonder how much the fine would have been if each spam message contained a song "owned" by one of the MAFIAA. You could generate a fine larger than the entire money supply of the whole world put together. This feels almost like a challenge now.

4,366,386 messages x $200,000 = $873,277,200,000 or $873.3 billion. Actually, it's only a couple hundred times more than what he owes now, which is more than the total amount of money the U.S. government gave the banks in the TARP [wikipedia.org] program, but still just under 1/3 of the U.S. national debt as of October 2009 [usatoday.com]. Are there any economists out there who can tell us if this amount of money is printed (Canada or U.S.)? Would it be theoretically possible for him to walk into the court, and pay in cash?

249,428,104,576, or 249.4 billion messages will surpass the world GDP.

$61,060,000,000,000 GDP of world [google.com] ÷ $244.80 per message. [slashdot.org] = 249,428,104,576 messages. Should a spammer send this many junk messages, and get caught, then by legal precedent he will owe the equivalent of the world GDP. I wonder if that's more than the number of AOL disks that have been mailed...

You know this is what bugs the hell out of me, it ain't the spam, its the stupidity. So as a public service to future spammers let the old Hairyfeet get up on his stump and pass some common sense...

ATTENTION SPAMMERS...You aren't doing this for your health, right? you actually want to make money doing this one can assume, correct? Then TARGET YOUR FRICKING AUDIENCE!!! dumbasses! This is a fricking geeksite, do you think ANYBODY here gives a shit about sports? what an idiot! Watch and learn moron, THIS is how you sell to geeks..*..Cheap iPad knockoffs!!! [chinagrabber.com] Cool funky flashdrives!!! [chinagrabber.com] Cheap game emulator running MP3 players!!! [chinagrabber.com]

See how easy that was? I bet there is a fricking stampede at that site right now, and their servers are glowing red hot from the giant nerd herd hitting the goodies. It is ALL about targeting your audience. Want to make money with food? Set up a donut shop next to the weight watchers. Want to make money off geeks? Then toys with lots of buttons, flash memory, dodgy hard drives, fake CPUs, all these things are like candy to babies.

*...I'm not actually getting any money for those links, just showing what one would use to target this audience, well and I like cheap toys too;-)

Who knew that Billion was spelled differently in Canada, maybe it is like color and colour.

Well maybe it has a whole other meaning. Unless he has that sort of money, they might as well have 12 unicorns and 3 pixies. Seriously what even happens to this indvidiual now that he owes a fine he can't pay? Jail? Bankruptcy (or doesn't that discharge legal fines)?

This is something that I've tried and tried and tried to explain to some of my friends that work in marketing. When you are sending spam, you are literally using somebody *else's* property in a way that they don't want you to use it in order to give them messages.

This should be looked at no differently than causing unused speakers in my house to play radio advertisements when I want them turned off.

You send spam, and it's taking up a limited resource (disk, bandwidth, power, man hours, etc.) to your end and against the will of the recipient. I really hope that there are more cases like this.

It's even worse than that in this case. According to the article, he was compromising other people's accounts using fake websites, and then using those accounts to send his spam so that it would appear to be from their friends. So, it's not just spam in this case - it's fraud and identity theft.

I will agree with spammers that an individual spam is not a major imposition. However, it does cost people something. E-mail isn't free, you have to maintain bandwidth to receive it (a double digit percentage of our university's usage is e-mail in various forms) and it does take time for people to delete it. Not a lot, but some. So, let's be fair, we'll say a 0.1 cent fine and 0.1 second of jail or probation time for each message. Oh what's that? You sent 1 trillion spam messages? Sorry, guess you are fucked then. Should have considered the scale of your operation.

I like it because it would really hammer home that the problem with spam is the scale, and that punishments would scale with that. So suppose you spam your company's mailing list a few times and rather than ask you to knock it off, your boss presses charges. Ok well you sent 10 messages to 1,000 people so 10,000 messages. You are on the hook for $10 in fines and about 16 minutes of probation. A mild slap on the wrist, basically, unlikely they'd even prosecute. However you are a major pharmaceutical spammer that has sent out 3 billion messages? That'll be $3 million please and we'll see you in about 9 and a half years.

I realize that the way the laws are structured now such a thing couldn't actually happen, I just like the idea. An individual unwanted e-mail message is not a big deal, that is true, it is the scale and thus the scale should determine the punishment.

Hmm I can't tell if you were trying to make fun of the Canadians for having bad currency and got it wrong, since that'd mean that their currency is incredibly powerful, or if you were making a striking commentary on how the us dollar is screwed. In any case I wanted to reply saying that 1 CAD is worth more than 1 USD nowadays, but it seems to be 1 USD to 1.0159 CAD atm.

That's correct, inflation has almost gotten us to the point where getting those Canadian coins in your change is a positive rather than a negative. I can't actually spend a $50 or $100 bill in more than half of the stores in my local area, ironic given the ever rising prices for everything.

Perhaps I'll be papering my walls with $20 bills within the next 10 years, ala the Weimar Republic.

Something that I simply don't know: what actually happens when someone is fined more than they are ever likely to earn in their lifetime? How much gets garnished? How do they eat, pay for shelter, etc.? At some point, I might prefer to just rob a bank and force the state to put a roof over my head and feed me if it happened to me...

Dunno about Canada, but a bit of sniffing around turned up this: US Federal law says that they can only take up to 25% of your paycheck [bcsalliance.com], or exempts up to 30x the federal minimum wage per week, whichever is bigger (though according to that site, child support, alimony and such can be taken in bigger amounts). They could come after a goodly chunk of what you own, though again, with a healthy dose of exemptions.

Basically, I figure that they'd leave you with enough stuff to live simply, and not much else.

Read the article! He was fined, not sued. Fines aren't dischargable in bankruptcy.

When they're made numbers, who cares??

Nobody is going to ever earn a billion dollars in their lifetime. They'll never be able to collect. They might be able to pinch a little out of his paycheque, but they need to leave him enough to eat and survive -- they can't just leave him indigent.

I'm not sure what they can do -- but you're never gonna collect $1 Billion from anyone.

Possibly they're not "upholding" the US court ruling, but rather, they're not finding contrary to what a foreign court has found. Splitting hairs? Maybe. The one SCOTUS case that I heard oral arguments for (yes, in person) was a jurisdictional issue. A US merchant had already been found against by the Chinese Admiralty, he didn't like it, counter-sued in the US and it made it's way up to SCOTUS. I think it was Ginsberg that came right out and asked why they should create an international incident by "over-ruling" a foreign court. Sharp lady.

A US court ruling has no power to get anything from the guy as long as he and all his possessions are outside of the US. Before anything happens in Canada a Canadian court needs to look at the case and see if it agrees on the ruling.

A US court ruling has no power to get anything from the guy as long as he and all his possessions are outside of the US. Before anything happens in Canada a Canadian court needs to look at the case and see if it agrees on the ruling.

From the summary:

A ruling by by a US District Court judge in San Jose, California has now been upheld by the Quebec Superior Court

There are various treaties in place between pairs or groups of nations that cover much of the civilized world and prevent you from escaping debt by fleeing the country in which you incurred the debt. As long as the debt was incurred in a way that is recognized as legitimate in the country you are now in, they will treat it just like any other debt.

Thus, in a case like this pretty much all the Canadian court would ask itself is whether or not, under Canadian standards, the US court legitimately had jurisdict

Funny..a company was just fined a few million for (illegal) human experimentation of their bone anchoring glue which resulted in several deaths, but a spammer that didn't cause any physical harm or death is fined a billion dollars. Let's get some file sharers fined for more than the GDP of several small nations combined too, for good measure.

I hate spammers, but you're telling me that a few million spam messages are worth more than several LIVES and ILLEGAL MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION ON HUMANS?

Funny..a company was just fined a few million for (illegal) human experimentation of their bone anchoring glue which resulted in several deaths, but a spammer that didn't cause any physical harm or death is fined a billion dollars. Let's get some file sharers fined for more than the GDP of several small nations combined too, for good measure.
I hate spammers, but you're telling me that a few million spam messages are worth more than several LIVES and ILLEGAL MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION ON HUMANS?

Absolutely! They found a practical use for lawyers! A discovery of that magnitude is worth a Nobel or two.

Funny..a company was just fined a few million for (illegal) human experimentation of their bone anchoring glue which resulted in several deaths, but a spammer that didn't cause any physical harm or death is fined a billion dollars. Let's get some file sharers fined for more than the GDP of several small nations combined too, for good measure.

I hate spammers, but you're telling me that a few million spam messages are worth more than several LIVES and ILLEGAL MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION ON HUMANS?

Absolutely! They found a practical use for lawyers! A discovery of that magnitude is worth a Nobel or two.

How many lives were impacted by the medical testing and how many lives were impacted by the spamming? I think $100 per person sounds pretty reasonable, and the spammer made a conscious decision to send the messages out to the other million or so people that received the spam. It was his fault, the spammer, that so many messages went out.

At the very least, this ought to make major companies shy away from potential spamming as I'm sure the shareholders would notice a billion dollars leaving the company.

Funny..a company was just fined a few million for (illegal) human experimentation of their bone anchoring glue which resulted in several deaths...

Oh come on... it's ONLY their bone anchoring glue. I mean, do we even need that? They could have died from anything. Loose bone syndrome. Wandering pelvis. Smoking. Boneitis. All of these are natural causes.

The U.S. and Canada have a way to register judgments issued in one country to be collected in the other. The person seeking to collect has to prove the judgment form the originating country and prove that it is not contrary to the public policy of the country in which collection is sought. The defendant can also use the collection attempt to launch a "collateral attack" and attempt to disprove the judgment, but doing this usually requires showing that the original court lacked jurisdiction or egregiously vi

A 1 billion dollar fine is absurd. First, there's no way he can ever pay it. Second, it is way out of proportion to the harm caused. Third, it undermines respect for the courts by making them look out to lunch, foolish and/or vindictive.

Think about what a billion dollars represents: the lifetime's earnings of a hundreds of well-paid people, or a thousand low-wage people, or the GDP of a small city. Spam sucks, but the damage this guy caused doesn't measure up.

I think they decided what the punitive damages for a single piece of spam would be, $100-$200, and multiplied by the number he sent out, 4.37 million messages. Seems pretty simple, he did 100-200 worth of damage 4.37 million times. It looks foolish, but on the other hand it doesn't.

The key here is "punitive" a way to make the dollar value go up to make it a deterrent. Like jail time, or loosing a limb, or... whatever for a crime.

Divide it down and maybe it is more reasonable. Suppose he sent 1 trillion spam messages, that could be a fine of just 0.1 cents per message sent. A spam message does cause harm. E-mail takes bandwidth to move around and bandwidth costs money. We could save a good bit on bandwidth costs at work if we could eliminate spam. It would save on incoming mail bandwidth, but also on bandwidth when people check their mail from off campus and get a spam message the filter didn't catch.

A 1 billion dollar fine is absurd. First, there's no way he can ever pay it.

It's common to be penalized more than you can pay. It sets a precedent. Such things can also be used to "send a message" to others: Do this, and it's not going to be financially beneficial. If an organization with a lot more money decided to do this, it would hurt.

It's like RIAA's scare tactics, which I think are despicable, but in this case I think it's okay to bankrupt someone who is making money off of scamming a lot of people, and I think it's okay to scare off people who would intentionally plan to har

To be honest I don't really care whether they can pay or not if the damages are proportional to the harm caused. Even if you're dead broke you can cause great grief to other people, same with people that serve a dozen consecutive life sentences. It's worth making the point even if there's nothing to be gained from it. But though I find spammers to be the scum of the earth, I got to admit there are worse people. It doesn't help taking the damage figures in US courts seriously either, it's like taken out of a

Actually, a billion dollars is WAY more money than any of the examples you gave. It's so much money, most people can't even wrap their minds around how big it is. The top 150 cities of GDP include cities that are ~$5 billion [citymayors.com]. That's the top 150 cities in the world. So, he has to pay back as much money as some large cities make. As for those hundreds and thousands of well-paid and low-wage people...how much do you consider low wage? (For me, 1000 * $30,000/year = $30 million - not even close to a billion.)

If they "fined" him $100 for each message, then with the 20+ messages that I got because of him means that the US government should be giving ME that money. I'm the one who got spammed, why is the government getting money for what he did wrong to me? That does not make sense.

Well according to the article, the court ruled that he owes Facebook the money, not the government. I guess it makes sense -- he used their network to distribute and profit off of the spam. He did so by tricking users into giving him their login credentials, and once he had that, he would run programs to send out the millions of spam messages. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone will see a dime out of this.

To just update you folks who don't like to read and feel like we should cut this guy a break, he didn't just send annoying spam messages - he conned passwords out of users and then fraudulently accessed their accounts. If it was just the spam that would be one thing, but this is much more serious than that. As far as article summaries go this one is pretty crappy because it misses the whole point of the story.

Any spammer which uses this line of argument should be locked in a prison cell with a 1200 baud terminal logged in to an email account. He only gets fed if he responds to the "Your food is ready" email within 15 minutes.

The email address he is given for this purpose is posted on every spammer list on Earth.

$1,068,928,721.46 ÷ 4,366,386 spam messages = $244.80 per message. I know we're probably trying to have a deterrent effect on spam, and it's a LOT lower than copyright fines, but it's still kind of high